Education opportunities and the NBN at EduTECH

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This article follows on from part 1, Technology and teaching: New ideas from EduTECH, which an be read, here.

The EduTECH conference is billed as 'Australia's largest education technology event' and it brings together thousands of delegates representing teachers and leaders from across every aspect of the Australian education system. So, what happens when you put over 2000 people who have the power to effect change in a room with some of the most celebrated minds in education theory? You get some big ideas...

How are we going to make this happen?

In between talk of process and product, there was a presence at the conference that has the power to help enable all of these by providing infrastructure - the NBN. Dr Kate Cornick, General Manager of the NBN's Education and Health division, was on hand discuss what role the NBN could play in reshaping Australian education.

The current percentage of schools with internet access in Australia is certainly higher than many other countries. However, it is the quality of that access that presents the problem. At present there are massive disparities in the speed and reliability of 'net connections to schools. Dr Cornick has seen schools with dedicated fibre connections and schools in some regional and remote areas with access speeds comparable to late-90's dial-up. This problem is hardly unique; a recent article in the New York Times comments on the ongoing issues America faces in delivering high-speed internet to schools in both rural and urban areas. However, the NBN offers the idea of a 'level playing field' of access, which in turn provides a torrent of possibilities for teachers and students.

One idea that puts a glint of excitement in Dr Cornick's eye is the potential of NBN to enable ubiquitous real-time video conferencing. She cites recent examples such as members of the Bell Shakespeare Company running virtual workshops for students in regional areas and the ability to conduct virtual field trips to places across the globe. Ubiquitous video conferencing also has the power to connect schools across the country, creating education communities that span states.

Another learning tool that the NBN can make possible is experiential learning driven by elements such as haptic feedback. Dr Cornick notes that haptic feedback is already being used at tertiary levels in fields such as surgical training. I'll admit to a moment of stunned daydreaming as I imagined History students using haptics to participate in live archaeology digs all over the world...

I challenged Dr Cornick to consider countries such as South Korea, which already possesses a superior level of internet access but has done little to remodel their education system around it. Dr Cornick acknowledged that the "largest barrier" to implementing technology in education was demonstrating to teachers that it would improve workflow. However, she also noted the inherently collaborative nature of teaching, and pointed out that as the platform becomes universal it will create opportunities for collaboration "across space and time" that the profession has still yet to consider.

It is this challenge of making the platform universal that Dr Cornick admits generates the most heated discussion. She freely admits that the question she fields from government ministers and her family alike is always, "When do I get it?" Building a national infrastructure makes achieving a single all-encompassing 'switch-on' date impossible, which unfortunately creates a 'low on the waiting list' mentality - I overheard a delegate from WA vent his frustration at his home state "not being taken care of like the Eastern states". However, her passion for the possibilities, seen and unseen, that the NBN creates has left me willing to wait it out.

Why bother?

There was a HEAP of cool ideas I heard during my time at EduTECH, ranging from showing students how to hack easy-to-acquire hardware like Wii controllers to make their own touch interfaces to using Minecraft to teach Global Warming by creating scale models of real-world coastal towns and then flooding them. But here's the thing about conferences: the enthusiasm they generate has a shelf-life. It's all too easy for teachers to return to the classroom and step back into familiar patterns of teaching and learning. The final call to action was given live via satellite from New York, where Sir Ken Robinson had hauled himself out of bed at 2am to bring together many of the ideas and concepts we had been offered over the previous two days.

Robinson is an advocate of teaching creativity, and with good reason. Like Ewan McIntosh, he spends much of his time with large organisations whose continued success requires a workforce that is adaptive, creative and flexible. Too often, he had been told, these are talents that flourish in spite of the current education system, rather than because of it.

Robinson then spoke about the opportunities for teaching creativity he saw in modern education. Stating that "the role of educators is to create climates of possibility", he cited the creation of the App Store for the iPhone - providing the smartphone as platform for creativity - and the "forest of related innovation" that had arisen as developers created apps Apple had not foreseen.

The EduTECH conference was a two-day pulse of bold thinking and big ideas. I hope that as the participants return to their classrooms and staffrooms they take with them a sense that they can affect meaningful change using the tools and ideas they have been introduced to. In a profession that often makes individuals feel powerless to change their ways of working and thinking, Robinson's final words to us were a reminder of the power and responsibility we all hold:

"If you are a teacher, you are the education system."

William Cohen is a secondary teacher living in Sydney. He is the National Education Content Manager for Red Apple Education and travelled to EduTECH as a delegate and speaker.

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